Though it’s been well over a year since Paul Walker’s tragic passing, his costars and friends are still suffering his loss. In a candid new interview with Entertainment Weekly, Walker’s Furious 7 costar Michelle Rodriguez admitted that she struggled in the year following her friend’s death.
“I actually went on a bit of a binge,” she said of the time following his November 2013 car crash death. “I went pretty crazy. A lot of the stuff I did last year I would never do had I been in my right mind.”
The action star, 36, called Walker “the deepest guy I know,” and the entire cast of the Fast and Furious franchise has been transparent about how close they were with the late actor.
“I could see Paul once every two years and just know there was another human on the planet who’s deep like me, who loves like that,” she continued. “When that disappears, you wonder, ‘Wait a minute, what do I hold on to?’ There was nothing to tether me to this existence: ‘Why am I f—king here? And, like, why’d you leave without me?’”
In her quest to find meaning in her life, Rodriguez admitted that she went off the deep end. From making out and going on topless vacations with British model Cara Delevingne, to dating Zac Efron while on horseback in Spain and generally partying very hard, her antics were widely publicized.
“I was pushing myself to feel,” she said. “I felt like nothing I could do could make me feel alive, so I just kept pushing myself harder and harder. I was traveling, and I was having sex. And I was just trying to ignore everything that I was feeling.”
But Rodriguez finally had a turning point and decided to shape up.
“I just woke up [one morning] with a profound respect for living,” she said. “I stood tall one day, and I said, ‘You know what, Michelle? Stop f—king hiding. Go manifest.’ And all of the sudden, I picked myself up and started hustling.”
Walker’s life was cut short at age 40 when a car in which he was a passenger collided with a pole. His final film is Furious 7, in which he reprised his role as Brian O’Conner. His costar Vin Diesel just announced that his newborn daughter was named Pauline after his late pal.
